Psychoanalysis and the Unrepresentable

From culture to the clinic

Agnieszka Piotrowska, Ben Tyrer, Agnieszka Piotrowska, Ben Tyrer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781138954977
• eBook ISBN: 9781317355755
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Psychoanalysis and the Unrepresentable opens a space for meaningful debate about translating psychoanalytic concepts from the work of clinicians to that of academics and back again. Focusing on the idea of the unrepresentable, this collection of essays by psychoanalysts, psychotherapists, counsellors, artists and film and literary scholars attempts to think through those things that are impossible to be thought through completely.

Offering a unique insight into areas like trauma studies, where it is difficult – if not impossible – to express one's feelings, the collection draws from psychoanalysis in its broadest sense and acts as a gesture against the fixed and the frozen. Psychoanalysis and the Unrepresentable is presented in six parts: Approaching Trauma, Sense and Gesture, Impossible Poetics, Without Words, Wounds and Suture and Auto/Fiction. The chapters therein address topics including touch and speech, adoption, the other and grief, and examine films including Gus Van Sant's Milk and Michael Haneke's Amour. As a whole, the book brings to the fore those things which are difficult to speak about, but which must be spoken about.

The discussion in this book will be key reading for psychoanalysts, including those in training, psychotherapists and psychotherapeutically-engaged scholars, academics and students of culture studies, psychosocial studies, applied philosophy and film studies, filmmakers and artists.

PART I
Approaching trauma

1
THE BODY LOCKED BY A LACK OF MEANING

Katrine Zeuthen and Marie Hagelskjær

Why is Freud´s dilemma still relevant today?

The theme of this collection, “Representing the Unrepresentable”, could also be the title of Freud’s longstanding examination, discussion, and theory development of how sexuality and sexual trauma come – or don’t come – into expression. Freud’s examination began with his original scientific ambition from his Studies on Hysteria (Freud and Breuer 1955) of uncovering a causal relationship showing that child sexual abuse expresses itself through bodily symptoms in a significant way that can be attributed to a specific starting point, thus proving what really happened. Present societal as well as academic discussions of what infantile sexuality is, how it expresses itself, and how it can be understood and not least protected, seem to hold on to Freud’s original ambition of finding a causal connection between an event and its expression: its symptom or its representation (see Elkovitch et al. 2009).

We still seem to be looking for a direct link between the child’s expression and reality, a correlation that can free us from analyzing and thus free ourselves from participating personally in what we see, hear, feel. We want to uncover the truth; however, the manual for this does not exist. Sexual abuse doesn’t express itself through unambiguous symptoms and reliable signs. On the contrary, sexual abuse challenges us and demands that we make use of some of our best abilities of discernment and interpretation: of analysis. It is therefore essential to have a theoretical model describing how infantile sexuality develops within the relationship between child and adult and what this means for the child’s development: both when development is handled with care and when the child is subjected to sexual abuse. Without a theoretical frame with which to understand the development of sexuality, our ability to assess and make judgments remains in a private and diffuse sphere, making reference to our own unconscious without us being aware of it (see Zeuthen and Hagelskjær 2013).

In his article “Fear of Breakdown”, Winnicott writes: “that what is not yet experienced did nevertheless happen in the past” (Winnicott 1974: 105). Something has occurred, but it has no place to be, because the child’s psyche is not yet a place that is structured in such a way that it can make sense of trauma. The French psychoanalysts Botella and Botella would add that what happened is a negativity. Trauma is first and foremost an absence or the negative of what could and should have happened:

A violent and abrupt absence of topographies and psychical dynamics, the rupture of psychic coherence and the collapse of primary and secondary processes as the ego loses its means. This brutal disorganization has its origin, not in a perception but in the absence of meaning in the violent excess of excitation and in the ego’s state of distress: in the ego’s incapacity to form a representation of them, to present them to consciousness.

(Botella and Botella 2005: 116)

Freud’s hysterics and the abandonment of the theory of seduction

Maybe because Freud himself was looking for a presence rather than an absence, he remained in doubt as to the origin and nature of infantile sexuality. He introduced his final seduction theory in 1896 (Freud 1962a, 1962b, 1962c), where he proclaimed that a sexual trauma could always be found as the basis for hysterical symptoms. Hysterics were suffering from memories of events that had been repressed, the brutal content of which they continued to defend against. The women had not been able to protect themselves against the sexual violations in childhood, while they were still in the process of growing up; therefore, the trauma came to delayed expression or nachträglich through the hysterical symptomatology.

However, Freud’s search to find a universal connection between repressed events and symptoms didn’t go so easily. He concluded that because his patients had registered the sexual experiences at the time they took place, even earliest childhood must contain sexual tension. In this way Freud began to allude to what would later take shape in his theory of infantile sexuality (Freud and Breuer 1955; Freud 1953). Freud’s journey back into his patients’ factual realities ended when he gave up the seduction theory and with it the belief that particular symptoms were always an expression of sexual abuse in childhood. Based on this finding, Freud concluded that it was not possible to determine whether the patients’ memories had actually taken place in reality or they were simply expressions of their fantasies. Freud wrote to his friend Fliess that: “there are no indications of reality in the unconscious, so that one cannot distinguish between the truth and fiction that is cathected with affect” (Freud 1966b: 260). Thus he confirmed his discovery that the unconscious did not distinguish between fantasy and reality, which made it difficult or even impossible to distinguish between truth and fiction when it came to remembered experiences that had been invested with affect.

Following this discovery, his studies shifted from investigating how outer events came to be expressed in the patient’s inner life to examining the significance of the patient’s inner world in and of itself to psychic life. Freud began from this point on to be interested in fantasy as an expression of the psychic. Fantasies were not direct depictions of external reality; rather, they represented something internal. In this way, psychic reality rose up out of the ashes of the seduction theory and was also constructed using some of the same clinical findings made by Freud under the production of that theory. The clinical findings took on a new meaning when they were understood in the context of psychic reality, now referring to something different and more uncertain than historical reality.

These examinations led Freud to the theory of a sexuality coming from within: an infantile sexuality not yet grounded in the body as a genital and goal-directed sexuality. And thus Freud’s groundbreaking Three Essays on Sexuality were born (Freud 1953). With his description of the psychosexual drives Freud broke from and for that matter still breaks from a more conventional view of sexuality, because he defined the sexual drive as both distinct from and also more than genital sexuality and the sexual act as such. Freud integrated the theory of psychosexual development into his metapsychology, in which he described the lack of synchronicity in development by showing that the individual is only able to understand the meaning of his own maturation retrospectively or nachträglich, as biology and the formation of cultural meaning do not progress at the same pace. The small child has fantasies about life’s big mysteries: birth, reproduction and the difference between the sexes; but he or she does not grasp the meaning of these fantasies until later in life when he or she has reached a level of biological maturity sufficient for understanding what we might call the culture of biology (see Zeuthen, Holm Pedersen, and Gammelgaard 2010). Contemporary theorists have attempted to reinterpret Freud’s essays by reading the theory of infantile sexuality as a theory about the breach that occurs between childhood and adult life at puberty, when the meaning of sexuality begins to dawn on the child. One of the most important of these theorists is the late French psychoanalyst Jean Laplanche, who rewrites Freud’s seduction theory in his own theory of generalized seduction (Laplanche 1970, 1987).

What is infantile sexuality according to Laplanche?

With his theory of generalized seduction and the sexual (2011a) Laplanche makes it clear that the sexual emerges through the manner in which the adult meets the child’s pleasure, and it is a premise of development that the child is at the mercy of the adult’s interpretation of the child’s needs. His theory can explain why we must give up a fruitless hunt for unambiguous symptoms of child sexual abuse, and it can sustain us in our view that it is not a question of whether a child has or has not been seduced, but rather of how and on whose premises the seduction took place.

Laplanche insists that the relationship between adults and the child must form the core of our understanding of the way in which infantile sexuality is potentially traumatizing. In his introduction to the concept of the enigmatic message, Laplanche takes up seduction as the foundation of child development in relation to the adult (1997, 1999a). The adult approaches the child with a special kind of care that is characteristic of that particular adult and which the child can sense. With the care comes a message: the adult shares something with the child, the meaning of which the child does not understand. The message is enigmatic. Nevertheless, the child must trustfully allow himself to be drawn in or seduced by the adult’s care, because it is the adult that will ensure the child’s survival. The child must let himself be seduced by the adult and by the meanings of the adult world, because children are dependent on adults and dependent on figuring out what is involved in relations to the adults, in order to be included and eventually to participate in the world on their own. Thus, for Laplanche seduction is a universal phenomenon based on the asymmetrical relation between adult and child: it is a fundamental anthropological situation created by the fact that the adult has a sexual unconscious and the child does not.

In this way Laplanche rereads Freud’s seduction theory and his later abandonment of that theory by adding that the child always gets seduced by a specific adult and that the child registers the adult’s sexuality and tries to understand its meaning (see Gammelgaard 2010). The adult meets the child’s search for pleasure, consciously as well as unconsciously, in a special way connected with the specific person that he or she is. The adult’s story and membership in a culture propels the child in his or her development, and in this way the child propels him- or herself from being passive and open to being actively able to close in on him or herself and create his or her own sense of meaning of the sexual. When puberty arrives and sexuality becomes genital and aim-directed, its place has already been taken:

What is acquired through the drives precedes what is innate and instinctual, in such a way that, at the time it emerges, instinctual sexuality, which is adaptive, finds the “seat already taken” as it were, by infantile drives, already and always present in the unconscious.

(Laplanche 2001: 49)

“The seat is already taken,” Laplanche writes, because sexuality has already been made sense of in the relationship between the child and the adult even before the child was able to understand this. Laplanche thereby confirms the importance of how we with our care allow the child to give pleasure content and meaning in a way that makes room for the child to turn his sexuality out into the world in accordance with the child’s development. It is therefore the adult’s job to allow some of the space to stand open by remaining unable to provide an explanation as to the meaning of the enigmatic sexuality, so that the child in time can discover it. The way that the child up to this point has been cared for, and the way in which the sexual has at once been present, inaccessible, and enigmatic between the child and the adult, create the foundations for sexuality (see Laplanche 2011b). When we begin to fathom the meaning of sexuality, its foundation has already been laid down within us by way of relationships with caregivers: for better, but also sometimes for worse.

The pathological perverse seduction: child sexual abuse

Today, psychological assessments of children causing concern about sexual abuse are mainly done through classical psychological test-instruments, examinations of drawings, observations of doll-play, and checklists such as The Trauma Symptom Checklist for Children (Briere 1996) and Child Sexual Behaviour Inventory (Friedrich 1997) that assess different kinds of behaviors such as hyper-sexualized behavior, sexual play, etc. It is commonly acknowledged that there is no direct way to gain univocal insight into the meaning of the child’s expressions, but still the aim is to get as close to the truth as possible. Furthermore great sensitivity from the psychologist is needed, as there is an ongoing preoccupation and societal expectation that the psychologist doesn’t induce certain ideas, fantasies, or memories in the child by being suggestive. From our point of view many of the internationally used assessment methods lack the central understanding that the child’s experiences and expressions are always embedded in a specific family, with specific relations and with unconscious conflicts tied to the adults that are taking care of the child. To examine the child detached from a theoretical understanding of the infantile sexual unconscious as something always developing in the relation between child and adult seems simplified and idealistic, putting the field in the same paradoxical situation as Freud experienced over a hundred years ago.

Laplanche’s theory of generalized seduction expresses a continuum of seduction, from the seductive and enigmatic yet humanizing communication that takes place between every caregiver and infant to the pathological perverse situations where communication is solely on the adult’s premises. Following this line of thought Laplanche divides the adult unconscious into a repressed part – what is generally known as the unconscious – and an enclaved part, an inner foreign body. The enclaved part of the unconscious is an encapsulated place where no psychic elaboration and representation can take place. According to Laplanche (2011b) the message given from the adult to the child through the sexual abuse stems from this enclaved part of the adult’s unconscious, and it affects the child’s psyche in a specific way. Laplanche describes sexual abuse as an intromission of messages that the child receives passively and cannot translate. The enigmatic part of the message is out of reach for the child, because for translation to take place the adult unconscious needs to be working at a level where the child can take part in the relation. The violent process of intromission creates a rupture in the child’s development, as the sexual abuse isn’t subjected to psychic representations and gaps of something unrepresentable, something that hasn’t been subjected to any psychic elaboration is placed as a foreign body in the child’s psyche. The enclaved message from the adult becomes enclaved in the child as well. This stands in contrast to the generalized seduction where the child can participate in a meaning-giving process (Laplanche 1999b). How these enclaved messages affect the development of infantile sexuality is of great interest to us and thus is a central part of our theoretically driven clinical research.

Practicing Laplanche’s theory

Here we try to combine Laplanche’s theory of generalized seduction, translation, and the sexual with our clinical research on childhood trauma, thus encircling the gaps of the unrepresentable: that which isn’t directly approachable and yet is s...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Figures
• Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Representing the unrepresentable
• PART I Approaching trauma
• PART II Sense and gesture
• PART III Impossible poetics
• PART IV Without words
• PART V Wounds and suture
• PART VI Auto/Fiction
• Index